1 fired, 2 suspended for roles in blackouts

Errors caused outages for nearly 1 million

One worker at the state’s power grid has been fired and two others were suspended for triggering rotating blackouts that led to nearly 1 million Southern Californians losing their electricity in the wee morning hours of April 1, the agency that oversees the grid said Thursday.

The Independent System Operator, which runs the grid, said the disciplinary actions took place April 9, slightly more than a week after the plant shutdown triggered rotating outages in 17 areas from the Mexican border into Orange County. The confirmation came a day after state Sen. Christine Kehoe alluded to the firing during hearings in Sacramento on the issue.

Citing privacy concerns, ISO spokeswoman Stephanie McCorkle did not identify the employees. except to say that they were “operations people who worked on the control room floor” at the agency’s headquarters in Folsom. Shortly after the blackout, the three employees were reassigned to other tasks while the agency investigated what happened.

To prevent another needless outage, the ISO is retraining workers to ensure that power plants aren’t shut down when they’re needed, implementing procedures to clarify what steps should be taken in a similar situation and changing its alarm system to warn of a lack of generation before a major power plant is shut down.

Nevertheless, critics say the agency has not done enough.

Michael Shames, who heads San Diego’s Utility Consumers’ Action Network, said the agency still has not provided a detailed description of how the blackouts occurred or why the plant’s operators could not question the ISO order to shut down.

In a letter last week to Yakout Mansour, the ISO’s chief executive, Shames suggested that the agency should make public its daily logs for March 31 and April 1, which would show the communications between ISO officials and the managers of the Otay Mesa plant.

“So far, the [ISO] has indicated to the public that it involved ‘operator error,’ ” Shames wrote. “But the nature of that ‘error’ requires substantial clarification.”

McCorkle said the daily logs contain market-sensitive data that energy companies could use to shape their bidding and that other details regarding the incident involve the employees’ privacy.

McCorkle said the ISO found that the three employees were involved in two major “errors.”

First, they acceded to a request from a scheduling coordinator of the Otay Mesa plant, which is owned by Calpine Corp. and sells its power to SDG&E, to shut down after midnight. She did not say why the scheduling coordinator, who works independently of the plant, asked for the shutdown, but said that such requests are not uncommon because the period between midnight and 5 a.m. typically has relatively low demand for electricity.

At the time, Otay Mesa was the only plant fully operating in San Diego County. The Palomar plant in Escondido and South Bay in Chula Vista were down for maintenance, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station was operating at one-quarter capacity, and only one unit at the Encina Power Station in Carlsbad was idling, with orders that it remain on reserve standby power.